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"The Plan"

June 08, 2012

Sounds ominous, doesn't it? Here's what "The Plan" looks like:

Or at least what the plan feels like inside my head. Since I've finished my manuscript, I've had several people ask me what's "the plan." I have one. I do. It's a "Hell, I'm not sure, but I'll wing it" kind of plan. It's what I do after every manuscript. Don't get me wrong, I have a general idea of what I need to do. For me, it's start small work big.

First order of business, do a clean sweep for obvious grammatical mistakes, homonyms, and other obvious blunders. When I write a first draft, I tend to puke the words on the page and do things like ease-drop for eavesdrop...um, yeah. Not my proudest moment. But in my defense, when I begin a story, the words tumble out so fast my brain tends to fudge things up.

Once it's clean, I HAD planned on sending it to Ara to read over but she was really eager to read it so I sent it to her, dirt and all. (Bless her heart. She's a saint.) Once she's done reading it, I'll use her comments for the hard edit. Then maybe to a beta reader and out the door by the first of August...that is, if everything goes smoothly like I want.

Now I know what you are thinking. I'm making a huge mistake by not sitting on my MS and giving tons of time before looking at it again. I'm sure you're thinking August is sending it out too early. Yes, I'm riding the my-MS-is-done-and-the-greatest-masterpiece-of-all-mankind high. But here's the deal, I wrote this book differently than all the others. Hear me out.

I've NEVER EVER looked forward to editing. Previous books, I was a pantser. Still am, sort of. But my pantsing has evolved. Before, I just wrote whatever popped into my pretty little head and was vaguely aware that something should happen here, and something else should happen here and an even bigger something should happen HERE. Well, that made editing a bitch. Huge scene cuts, major rewrites, plot threads tweaked and snipped, massive clean-ups that would make Chernobyl look like a Bounty paper towel commercial.

This book, as I wrote, it came so fast and furious in my head that I had to jot down notes. Quickly those notes became this massive beast of chaos so I organized it. And what do you know, the dang thing started to look vaguely like an outline. I've already told this to you guys BUT the reason I bring it up again, is because I feel like plot/character/story wise, THIS manuscript is fairly clean. Sure I need to tweak stuff, but it's nothing like the massive overhaul I had to do on my previous works. I'm actually looking forward to the editing. Now, if I can just get my kiddos out of my hair for a half a second, I might could get to work on this thing. My brain is usually mush by the evenings, so instead of reading in the wee hours of the morning, I'm going to whittle away at my book. If I'm diligent, I will have something to query by August.